


on his torn and broken wings

by coloredink



Category: Haibane Renmei, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Drama, Friendship, Fusion, Gen, Magical Realism, Suicide, Wingfic sort of?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-26 20:19:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/pseuds/coloredink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We're born here in adult bodies, with no memories of our pasts, but with prior knowledge of what is required to function in this world--in fact, with more than that.  This leads me to believe that we had...previous lives."</p><p>Fusion with the world of Haibane Renmei/Ailes Grises, but requires no prior knowledge of that world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. born beneath a distant lonely star

**Author's Note:**

> This was also, once upon a time, a really crappy kinkmeme fill. It's gotten better.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a man as scientific as Helios, it must drive him mad, for this place to be such a mystery.

He opens his eyes. He looks at the clock. It reads 4:33. He closes his eyes. Then he looks at the clock again. It's still 4:33. 

The room is bland and featureless: a bed, a desk, and not much more than that. He looks at the clock. It still reads 4:33. He realises, with a cold, heart-clenching certainty, that time has stopped, and that it will always be 4:33.

Then he is born.

\-----

He doesn't remember very much after that. He's on the floor of a room somewhere, naked and covered in slime. Someone picks him up--or perhaps several someones, he can't be very easy to move--and mutters soothing nonsense in his ear.

When next he's conscious, he's in bed with the covers pulled up to his chin. He blinks blearily up at the ceiling. Something hovers in front of his face. It takes him a few moments to focus on it: a straw. A straw in a cup. He closes his lips around it and sucks, and water rushes in to soothe his parched throat.

"That's enough now," says a kind voice, and the cup removes itself. He nearly whines for more. "Drink it too fast and you'll make yourself sick.

An old woman sits next to the bed. She has a warm smile, sharp eyes, and a wrinkled face and hands. Her eyes are sharp, and her greying hair cut short and sensible. A pair of wings, too small to be of any use in actual flight, fan out behind her, the feathers a beautiful pearl-grey. A thin, elegant halo floats inches above her head.

"What did you dream about?" she queries.

"What?" he says, still fixated on the halo. There is something not right about it, but he's not sure why he thinks that. He's not sure of anything.

"You had a dream, in the coccoon," she says, gently and slowly, as if to a small, muddled child. "What was it about? Quick now, before you forget."

He casts his mind back. Was there a cocoon? Was there a dream? He can't really remember. He closes his eyes. "I think...there was a clock. The time was always 4:33."

"Hmm." She purses her lips. "Were you doing anything else?"

"I don't know." He blinks, several times, as if the fluttering of his eyelids will dislodge more visions and send them cascading down. "I don't think so. I think I was just lying there."

"I'll think about it, then." She sets the cup on the bedside table and rises. The rest of the room has hardly any more personality than the cup and straw: the bed he is lying in, a wardrobe at the farther end, and the chair she was seated in. 

He suddenly wants very much to not be left alone in this room, with its single bed and its single chair and its single wardrobe. Something tragic grips his heart. "Wait," he says. "Don't go." He tries to lift his hand, to grab her skirt or pluck her sleeve, but it only twitches on the bedspread.

She smiles at him. "I'll be right back."

"I'm sorry." He's embarrassed. He doesn't know why he's embarrassed. "I'm sorry..."

"It's all right." She pats his hand. Hers are warm; his are cold. "You can call me Marsh. We'll get _your_ name sorted later."

"My name? But my name is..." He can't remember his name. He can't remember anything that happened before he ended up in this dusty, empty bedroom. He awaits the return of that clutch in his chest, but something else is stealing over him: a pleasant, empty lassitude, like the kind that comes after a long run. But how does he know what that hard fatigue feels like?

Marsh adjusts the covers around him, tucking them in around the corners so that not a sliver of cold air slips in under the duvet. "Get some rest. The fever'll be starting soon."

"The fever?"

"I'll be there."

The door snicks shut, and his eyelids fall, pulling exhausted slumber down with them.

\-----

The next time he wakes he's drenched in sweat, his back one long fire of agony. He's turned on his stomach, face buried in the pillow as the rest of him sobs and screams and grasps the sheets, every part of him contracted in pain. The sheets feel like thorns, and he kicks them off, but the cold air feels like whiplashes.

He nearly vomits when he feels something moving under his skin on both sides of his spine, his own body just another alien in this alien place. When it tips finally break, it's almost a relief: it's so excruciating that it wipes everything else and leaves his mind a screaming, blissful blank. Maybe he screams; maybe he doesn't. Maybe he passes out; maybe he doesn't. He doesn't know, and that's nothing new.

Marsh, true to her word, is there for all the curses and tears. She coaxes him to drink more water, during the brief respites from the agonies of his traitorous body, and mops the sweat from his brow. She says things, surely, the same low-voiced nonsense that one whispers to wailing babies.

When it finally ends, he's clutching his tear- and spit-stained pillow and Marsh is brushing his wings with a stiff-bristled brush. The sensation is akin to someone combing his hair. Flecks of dried blood and slime adorn the rumpled sheets and the hardwood floor. Presently, she swirls the brush in a basin of water and leaves it with its handle resting against the rim of the bowl. She leans forward, hands on her knees.

"I've thought of a name for you," she says. "Well, I didn't, really; Helios did."

"Helios?" he mumbles into the pillow.

"I told him about your dream, and he suggested the name 'Aeon.' What do you think?"

A distant, intellectual part of him thinks that the name is a bit stupid, and that it isn't really his; he knows, deep down in the part of him that makes his bone marrow and houses what makes him _him_ , that he has a real name somewhere out there. The part of him that's tired and thirsty and achy and here in this world now absorbs the name and makes it part of him. If someone were to call "Aeon!" down a busy street, he would turn around. "I suppose it's all right."

She beams at him. "Good. Now drink up." She holds out the now-familiar cup with its straw. Aeon props himself up on his elbows and obeys. "And I'll see about bringing you some clothes. I'm sure we have something that fits."

\-----

"Helios!" Marsh calls, her voice quavering. No answer. She looks at Aeon and shrugs. "He comes and goes."

She offers her hand, but Aeon refuses it, preferring instead to grip the railing and make his painful way down step by step by step. It takes him what feels like hours to hobble down the stairs, and at the end of it he's sweating like he's growing wings again, the muscles of his jaw tight and sore from clenching his teeth. His leg throbs like it's been stabbed, but he knows there's nothing wrong with it. He just tried to get out of bed and fell.

"Hang on," says Marsh, and Aeon can do nothing but hang on, with both hands, to the railing at the bottom of the stairs--there's another flight down to the front door, God!--and wait as Marsh rummages around in a cupboard somewhere. She comes back with a cane. It's ugly and inelegant, made of aluminium and rubber, obviously hospital-issue. Aeon takes it with burning ears and mumbles a thank you.

"Now, first thing's first," says Marsh. "We'll get you fed--you must be starving." She bustles into the kitchen, Aeon stumping after her, and begins a great clanking and banging of pans about, prattling all the while.

The flat is a _mess_ ; strange, when the bedroom Aeon was just in is tidy to the point of being spartan. Aeon can't tell what's decorative and what's merely rubbish. Some kind of antelope skull hangson the wall, and a much more unsettlingly human one adorns the mantlepiece. Papers and books pile and slide on every available surface, including the floor. A violin case lies open on the couch, but the violin itself sits in one of the chairs, and the bow rests on the desk. Aeon peers into the kitchen, where it is hardly any better: chemistry equipment occupies most of the kitchen table, and some of the counters as well. Marsh has cleared for herself a little space and is busily occupied beating eggs.

"Have a sit," she instructs. Aeon seats himself at the kitchen table, where he studies the glassware. Erlenmeyer flask, Buchner flask, beakers, burette, bunsen burner...how does he know these names, these terms? Why these, but not his name?

"Now, there's a lot you'll have to learn, to live here," Marsh goes on. "So do try to listen. I dare say you'll forget some of it, but that's all right, I'll explain again."

People like them are called Wings. Wings have always lived at 221 Baker Street, which consists of three flats: A, B, and C. (They're currently in flat B; Marsh lives in flat A. No one lives in flat C right now.) Wings are born out of coccoons that appear in the bedrooms; like Aeon, they're born without their wings at first, and then they grow that first night. Wings must work, and yet they aren't allowed to accept money: they must barter for whatever they want or need, although neighbours are more than happy to help a Wing out, now and then. Wings are not allowed to leave Central London.

"But...why?" asks Aeon.

Marsh scrapes scrambled eggs onto Aeon's plate and finishes it with two triangles of toast, already buttered. "You'll see when we go outside. A Wing can't leave Central London even if they wanted to."

"No, I mean...why all this? Why am I a Wing? Why am I here, and why--"

Marsh sighs. "Oh Lord, you're just like Helios."

"And _why does my leg hurt?_ " Aeon demands.

"Oh, well that I don't know," Marsh admits. "First time I've ever seen anything like that. Helios may be able to figure it out. I never met such a bright young man straight out of the coccoon."

After breakfast, Marsh takes Aeon to Speedy's, the sandwich shop downstairs, to get his halo. Mr Chatterjee brings it out of the kitchen with a pair of tongs, accompanied by a great deal of hissing and sizzling. He holds it over Aeon's head for thirty seconds. Afterwards, it's fixed in place as if by an invisible force, and when Marsh demonstrates by tugging on his halo, the rest of him comes along too, as if he's being pulled by the ear.

Then Marsh takes him to the corner, where Aeon gets his first view of the wall.

It ought to have a capital W. It goes up at least forty, no maybe fifty, maybe sixty metres--it's hard to tell--and all of grey stone. It seems to reach all the way up to the sky, so tall that that it appears to lean, and no matter where he turns, there it is, blocking off the horizon. Aeon thinks he can see cars vanishing into it, in the distance, and coming out again, so there must be tunnels or something that allow people to pass through. But not Wings.

"Helios tried, of course," Marsh says. "By the time I found him he was half-dead with fever. I thought he wouldn't make it. And then," she adds, "he went right back and tried it again."

\-----

Marsh spends the day with him, although it's clear neither of them really knows what to say to the other. She launders the sheets in the upstairs bedroom and finds Aeon some more clothes, stashed here and there throughout the flat, until he has quite the wardrobe of secondhand trousers and shapeless jumpers, all of which have generous slits in the back for his wings. Left behind by previous inhabitants, says Marsh. Where did they go, if Wings are not allowed to leave London? Did they move into their own flats? If so, why didn't they take their clothes with them? He tries, throughout the day, to flap his wings, but they only twitch unevenly.

Pink spreads across the sky, deepening to blue and indigo at the edges. Marsh draws back the curtain to peer out the window, occasionally at first, and then every few minutes, before wringing her hands and declaring, "I don't know where that Helios has got to."

Aeon says nothing; presumably Helios is an adult, like himself, and doesn't have to abide by a curfew. Then he recalls what Marsh said about the wall, and he knows that Marsh is picturing him lying prone and ill on the ground somewhere. He thinks he would be glad to leave his place anyway, and heaves himself to his feet. "I'll go look for him. Could use a bit of fresh air, anyhow."

Marsh turns from the window. Aeon does not miss her glance at his leg. His hand tightens around the cane.

"He's very tall," she says, "and thin, and pale. Dark hair."

And he has wings, Aeon thinks. And a halo.

\-----

He goes round the neighbourhood first, looking for a tall, thin, dark-haired man with wings and a halo. When the crowds reveal nothing to him, he heads into Regent's Park. It's full dark by now, or at least dark by London standards; in this city that never sleeps, the sky never deepens past that bruised plum colour, with only a handful of faded stars. (And how does Aeon know this characteristic of cities?) Aeon turns up his collar and continues to stomp doggedly through the park, though his leg aches and his hands are freezing. He doesn't feel like going back yet, to Marsh's well-meaning ministrations and that flat stuffed full of questions.

"Ah, you must be the new flatmate. Good; come with me."

Aeon stops and turns. Did he really walk right past Helios? But how? Then Aeon realises that his wings aren't white, but the deep greeny-black of a raven's wing, nearly hidden in the folds of his long, dark coat. He _is_ quite a bit taller than Aeon, his halo hanging casting faint light down upon his dark curls. The man is dapper and elegant as a swan, and Aeon suddenly feels very damaged and dumpy, even as Helios beckons impatiently for him to follow.

"Where are we going?" Aeon asks.

"Angelo's," Helios replies.

That is how Aeon finds himself sitting in an Italian restaurant, across the table from Helios, eating a plate of pasta he's not sure he ordered. Helios stares out the window, tense and alert as a cat eyeing a bird, his wings folded tightly against his back.

Aeon forks up a few pieces of penne. They're very cheesy and very good. "What're we looking for, exactly?"

"Cab," Helios says tightly. "I've lured a serial poisoner to that bank across the street, right there. I've reason to believe he's a cab driver. Ah...there...yes! Let's go!" Helios springs from his seat, spilling his silverware to the floor and upsetting Aeon's glass of water. Aeon gets a faceful of black cloth in the face, and then Helios is gone, the door swinging shut behind him. Aeon gets to his feet and races behind.

Under ordinary circumstances, Aeon would despair of ever catching up to a cab, no matter how bad the traffic. But these are not ordinary circumstances: Helios does not race after the cab, but darts down an alleyway and takes a sharp left at the end of it. Aeon can just hear him muttering under his breath, catching words and phrases such as "red light" and "construction" and "no left turn between the hours of five and eight," and Aeon can feel them winding a mad zigzag through the heart of London.

They're on a roof. Aeon isn't even sure how they got up here. Did they climb a ladder? Must have. But they're here now, and Helios doesn't even pause, just sails across the gap between the buildings, wings fanning out around him. He lands on the other side in a crouch, wings mantled, his eyes bright as a cat's. He's panting and grinning and wild.

"Well?" Helios calls. "Come on!"

Aeon takes a deep breath and a running start.

His wings, so recalcitrant earlier in the day, snap open as if of their own accord. Aeon feels the wind flowing over and under them, ruffling his feathers. He'll never fly with these puny little things, but it's marvellous anyhow, to feel as if he's free of gravity. He lands on the other side with a terrible jolt to his knees, but Helios is laughing with him until he snaps to with a "come on, we're losing him!" And then they're off again, and Aeon has never felt so light on his feet.

They land on the ground again, and Aeon knows the cab is close; he can feel it signalling deep in his bones. Helios whirls to face him. "Stay back," he urges, low and quick, the words stumbling over themselves in their haste. "I've got it." And then Helios hurls himself out into the street, arms and wings spread, a dramatic silhouette in the headlights of the oncoming cab. Aeon gasps in horror, but the cab screeches to a halt just inches from Helios' toes. Helios dashes around to the driver's side. The driver rolls down his window and peers out at him. He's an older gentleman, with grey hair and pronounced front teeth that give him a squirrelly air.

Pressed against the brick a good many feet away, Aeon cannot quite hear the conversation. He sees Helios flash the driver a quick grin, jarring and false, and then he sees an answering smirk cross the cabbie's face. A premonition grows heavy in his stomach, and before Aeon can call out a warning, Helios is tilting to one side, slumping over on the side of the cab. Aeon is out of his hiding place before he even sees the syringe.

" _What_ do you think you're doing," Aeon snarls. The cabbie's arm isn't yet all the way back inside the cab; Aeon seizes that arm by its wrist, slams it twice against the door, until the syringe clatters to the ground somewhere at his feet, and punches the man several times in the head. The driver is old, Aeon remmembers after the first punch: not feeble, but older than Aeon himself, probably near what most people would consider retirement age. After the second punch, the man is screaming and flailing at the wheel with his other arm--the one that was holding the syringe is still in Aeon's grasp--and manages to punch the gas. The vehicle lurches forward once and stalls, and then Aeon breaks the man's wrist.

The driver gives a blood-curdling scream and hunches over in his seat, trying to pull his arm back in. Aeon lets him, and crouches over Helios on the ground. He feels Helios' pulse, discovers him still breathing, eyes half-open but unfocused, and goes through his pockets. He finds a phone and dials 999. He tells the dispatcher their location and Helios' condition, adding at the last minute that they're both Wings. Then he places the phone in his own pocket and stands back up to check on the cabbie. He's sobbing quietly, curled around his injured arm. Aeon leans against the side of the car and feels all the energy drain out of him suddenly, like there's a hole in the bottom of his bucket. He realises that he doesn't have his cane.

\-----

Aeon wakes up sore the next morning, and a smile spreads across his face as soon as he remembers why. He lies there for a few moments, eyes half-open, feeling warm and heavy as a pudding under the covers. He could easily slip back into a doze--after all, what does he have to do today?--but he can hear movement downstairs. Is it Marsh? Or Helios, recovered after their misadventures of last night? Aeon heaves himself out of bed.

It's Marsh, cracking eggs into a pan in the kitchen. "He's all right," she says, upon spying Aeon's tousled head peeking around the corner. "Woke up in the middle of the night wanting to know what'd happened. So I told him."

"Oh," says Aeon. Not having anything else to say or do, he pads into the bathroom.

As he's brushing his teeth in front of the mirror, he spies something different about one of his wings. He spits the foam into the sink and takes a closer look: there, a single black feather, on the upper edge of his left wing. It takes him a while, working backwards in the glass, to find and pluck it. It comes out with a little arc of fire, like pulling a grey hair, and his wing twitches. He peers at the feather, shrugs, drops it in the bin, and thinks no more about it.

Helios stumbles into the bathroom just as Aeon's finishing his last swirl and rinse. He squints at Aeon with a befuddled expression on his face, as if he's not quite sure what he's doing there, and then his expression clears. "You," he says. He makes it sound like an accusation.

Aeon freezes in the midst of towelling off his face. "Ye-es?"

"You assaulted that man."

"Broke his wrist," Aeon agrees.

The two men stare at each other.

"Are you all right?" Helios asks, at last.

Aeon raises his eyebrows. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Helios twists his face into an expression somewhere between disdain and disinterest and spins his hand around on the end of his wrist. "You assaulted a man...we'd barely just met..."

Aeon mulls this over. He supposes he ought to feel worse than he does. Last night--early this morning, really--he stumbled home with Helios sprawled over his shoulder and slurring half-conscious imprecations. Marsh had helped put Helios to bed, and then Aeon lay awake in his own bed for what felt like hours before finally drifting off to sleep. And then this morning he woke up...happy, he decides. Yes, definitely happy.

"He wasn't a very nice man," Aeon decides.

Helios stares. Then one side of his mouth twitches up into a smile. Aeon can't help but smile back. 

\-----

Aeon's half-finished with his breakfast by the time Helios makes his way to the table, but Aeon stays and nurses a cup of coffee just to listen to Helios explain his reasoning: that five "serial suicides" simply could not be suicides at all, a deduction that a cabbie must be the murderer, a trap laid using one of the victims' mobiles.

"And my limp?" Aeon asks; he found his cane propped up in the front hall. Marsh said someone brought it round last evening.

"Wings are not born with injuries," Helios says. "And in any case, if it were a real injury you wouldn't have walked all the way to Regent's Park looking for me. No; it had to be psychosomatic, and fortunately I had an opportunity to put that to the test." He looks down at his plate, still mostly full of toast, and then up again. "And a good thing, too."

Aeon smiles despite himself. "So this is what you do, then? Risk your life to show off?"

"Why would I do that?" Helios sniffs.

"Because you're an idiot."

Helios gapes at him, and then he laughs. Aeon laughs too.

Marsh pokes her head into the room. "What're you two going on about?" she wonders, but she's smiling.

\-----

"I don't understand it," Aeon says as they leave New Scotland Yard, where they--but mostly Helios--were berated by Detective Inspector Lestrade for taking unnecessary risks, which Aeon is now given to understand is typical behaviour for Helios. (Not unexpected, given what he's seen of the man so far.) Helios, it seems, is a consulting detective, and the only one in the world: he invented the profession. Wings must work, as Helios reminded Aeon with asperity, but damned if Helios was going to wash dishes or prune roses. He discovered not long after he hatched that he had a talent for observation, and that his head seemed to be filled with an encyclopaediac knowledge of crimes, and the means and ways by which they're committed. He started lending his talents to the police as well as the neighbours in a surrounding fifteen-block radius, and as a result he is never in want of clean linen, food, or even a free smartphone.

Helios heaves a groaning sigh. "It's very simple. The five people were abducted by--"

"No, I understand that part," Aeon says with a smile. "What I don't understand is...all of this. Where I came from, why we have wings, why we have to work but we aren't allowed to earn money. Why we can't go beyond the wall. I asked Marsh, but she wouldn't answer me," he adds.

"Ah, yes." Now Helios' tone is wry and derisive. "The great mystery of the Wings. Why are we here? Where do we come from? Who made all these rules?" He puts his hands in his pockets and turns to look at the great grey wall, looming over London, so tall that it seems to curve at the top. "Well, it's true enough that we can't cross it."

"Marsh said you tried. More than once."

Helios' mouth turns up at the corner. "I had to be scientific about it." They walk, wings tucked against their backs to keep from jostling the other pedestrians. "I generally don't theorise in advance of the facts, but in this case there are very few facts. There isn't much of a written history on the Wings, and Marsh was able to tell me only so much about the Wings who lived at 221 Baker Street prior to her arrival. Everyone seems to accept that we just _are_ , and that this is the way it must be. Imbecilic."

"So what's your theory, then?" Aeon queries.

They've come to a red light. Helios looks up at the sky for a few moments and doesn't answer. When he does, it's in an uncharacteristically quiet tone, and he doesn't look at Aeon. "We're born here in adult bodies, with no memories of our pasts, but with prior knowledge of what is required to function in this world--in fact, with more than that. You seem to possess knowledge of hand-to-hand combat, for instance, in the same way that I possess knowledge of poisons." The light turns green, but they don't move; pedestrians part and swarm around them. "This leads me to believe that we had...previous lives."

"Previous lives." Aeon blinks. "Like, what, reincarnation?"

"Of a sort. It's the only thing that makes sense. The dreams that we have, before we were born...Marsh asked you about your dream, didn't she?" At Aeon's nod, Helios goes on, "I speculate that they're not dreams at all, but our previous lives. The ones we can't remember."

Aeon thinks about his so-called coccoon dream: the clock that always read 4:33. "What did you dream about?"

"A bright light," Helios replies. "The sun, or like it."

Hence _Helios_ : the sun god. A classical name. Marsh has hidden depths, if she's the one who named him. "I dreamed about a clock that read 4:33," Aeon says. Boring, compared to Helios'.

Helios' mouth twitches into another smile. "Yes, she told me. I was the one that suggested the name _Aeon_. It seemed a little more, ah, appealing than 'Blink' or 'Chronos.'"

Aeon laughs. "Thank God!"

\-----

After that is some of the happiest time in Aeon's memory--well, not that he has very much of that. But whatever life he led before, he can't believe that it was as fun or mad as this madcap flight of days. And Helios, for his part, seems more than glad to have a companion on his adventures, especially one who's handy in a fight. Together, they solve a case involving a valuable gem found inside a frozen goose at Sainsbury's; foil two attempted bank robberies; and expose a well-known (but unproven) blackmailer. 

Aeon supposes he ought to find his own profession--Helios theorises that he was military or law enforcement in his past life--but there seems to be no great imperative, when he can bob along in Helios' wake. And Helios likes having him there, doesn't he? Even when he scoffs at Aeon's "stupid, ignorant" questions, in the next breath he turns and calls Aeon his conductor of light. He values Aeon's keen eye, steady hand, and unwavering loyalty. He doesn't say so, but Aeon knows it to be true.

Some of Helios' cases come from outside London. Those, of course, he can't investigate in person, but he's canny enough that often all he requires is a description. Aeon watches in fascination as Helios unravels cases whilst sitting in his armchair, asking seemingly pointless questions that lead to a hidden answer: Did you notice any strange smells? What colour was the ladder? And what of the dog? For the most part, his clients go away happy, leaving behind cartons of eggs, fine shirts (which Marsh pokes holes in, for their wings), mobile phone minutes, flowers. But not money, never money; Wings don't deal in money. But who needs money, when their guests give them soap?

Aeon is content, and he thinks, most of the time, so is Helios. But sometimes--often, when there are no cases on--he finds Aeon brooding. He shuts himself up for days at a time in his room, or scrapes away on his violin (another gift from a satisfied customer) whilst staring out the window, or simply stands on the front step, wrapped in his long coat and staring into the distance. Staring at the wall.

For a man as scientific as Helios, it must drive him mad, for this place to be such a mystery.

\-----

As the weeks pass, the black feathers begin to show thick and fast in Aeon's wings. At first it's just one here, one there, as it was that first morning, and Aeon plucks them without a second thought. Then they begin to show up in twos and threes, and one morning he wakes to find his wings fairly dappled with black feathers, so that he looks like a speckled bird. Perhaps it's a natural maturation phase in Wings? Helios has black wings, after all, though Marsh's are pearl-coloured. People come in tall and short, dark and fair, thin and wide; why shouldn't Wings come in different colours as well?

"Oh, no," Marsh clucks, brushing her fingers across his wings.

"Is it bad?" Aeon asks. As his back tenses, his wings arch and flutter.

"Oh, no...well, yes," Marsh sighs. "It means you're Sin-Bound. Like Helios."

"What does that mean?" 

Marsh has one hand pressed against her breast and looks as if one of her sons just got called up for the draft. She shakes her head. "It means you'll never achieve your Day of Flight. Well, not unless you can learn what sin it is that binds you to this place. Some Wings do, I hear, but some Wings don't, and..." She shrugs. "And they never fly."

"What?" Aeon shakes his head. Sometimes this place seems to speak to him in riddles. "I'm sorry, I don't understand--"

Marsh pats him on the shoulder. "You will soon enough."

"The Day of Flight?" Helios says, when Aeon asks him about it later. He's lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling, but not in one of his dark moods; Aeon has learned to recognise those. It'll turn dark later, if he's not given anything to do--it's been two days since their last mystery--but today he's merely pensive. Thoughtful. "Ah. Well, I imagine she's nearly due. There's nothing keeping her here, far as I can tell."

Aeon plants his hands on his hips. "Sorry, what're you going on about?"

"I've never witnessed it myself," says Helios, "but Marsh has. She says it's when a Wing passes over the wall, but I'm not sure that isn't a metaphor." His hands are tented under his chin, as if in prayer, but now he extends one hand over his chest and clenches and unclenches it, perhaps unconsciously. The tendons stand out on the back of his hand. "If there was a place that we came from before, then there's...well, it seems there's a place we go after. I don't know where. It may be death, or it may not. But apparently the black wings are a manifestation of some 'sin'--" here Helios gives a derisive snort, "--that keeps us here. So we'll never move on."

Aeon swallows. "And if we...if we don't? Move on."

Helios shrugs. "Then I suppose we just stay here."

\-----

Aeon knows the day has come when he goes downstairs one morning and finds Marsh fully dressed and no breakfast on the table. "I'm not your mother," she said to them once, and yet she behaved as if she was: staying up for them if they were out too late, preparing breakfasts for them in the mornings and sometimes even supper in the evenings, making sure the flat wasn't too much of a tip, doing their laundry. A lump forms in Aeon's throat upon seeing Marsh in the front hall in her Sunday best, even her hat. Helios emerges from his room, just pulling his jacket on over his starched white shirt.

"You look lovely," Aeon says, coming to a stop in front of her.

"I want to go looking my best," Marsh says, adjusting her hat. "Come on, then, boys." She crooks out her elbows, and both of them take her by the arms.

They walk to Regent's Park. On the way, Marsh says, "I remembered my dream this morning. That's how I knew it was time."

Aeon knows very little of her coccoon dream. Wings only ever remember bits and pieces of it at first, Marsh explained; more reveals itself later, if they're patient. All she could ever remember of hers was a sensation of heat and moisture in the air, and of a green bog: hence the name _Marsh_ , given to her by a predecessor at 221 Baker Street.

"My husband was a dreadful man," she says. "He did terrible things. But I loved him anyhow. You don't stop loving someone just because they turn out to be a serial murderer." She sighs. "But something went wrong in the end, I suppose, and he put me in the swamp with the others. I expect my corpse is still there, if it hasn't been eaten by an alligator."

Aeon is stunned. "That's...that's awful."

Marsh shrugs. "Well, it's all over and done with now, isn't it? No sense hanging onto the past. And now I can move on."

They have to walk a long way to the park, but Aeon hardly begrudges it now. His leg hasn't ached since that first wonderful, miraculous chase with Helios. And as for Helios, he is silent, letting Marsh grip him by the arm, slowing his long strides to match her smaller ones.

Once inside the park proper, Marsh seems to know exactly where to go. "We always do," she says. "I think all the Wings only ever go from this place." And that place is a little island in the boating lake. A wooden bridge leads over the water into it, but the island itself seems a little overgrown. Marsh will have hardly any place to put her feet. But then, Aeon supposes with a stab of what seems very much like grief, it's not as if she'll have to have her feet there long. But how is she supposed to gain flight in such a crowded space?

Marsh lets go of their arms. She sets first one foot on the bridge, with a little hollow ring, and then the other. She turns to face the two men, her hands clasped in front of her.

"Now, when I'm...when I'm gone, you be sure to check all the rooms for new cocoons," she says. "Wouldn't want someone to hatch without anyone there."

Aeon nods. "We will," he says, though he knows very well that he'll probably be the only one to check.

Marsh smiles at them. Her eyes pinken. "You don't have to stay," she says. "You don't have to watch."

Aeon finds that he can't speak. But Helios does, for both of them: "We'll stay."

Marsh looks from Helios to Aeon, then back again. She dabs at her eyes quickly with her thumbs, and when she speaks, her voice cracks. "Oh, I wish I'd known you both...back there, wherever that was."

Helios doesn't reply, but Marsh doesn't seem to have been expecting him to. She simply turns and marches into the undergrowth, back straight, and as Aeon watches her retreating back, he thinks he has never known such a wonderful, strong woman in all his life.

The trees swallow her up. Aeon and Helios stand there, side by side, and Aeon wonders how they'll know when it's happened. Will they see her ascend? Or will they just have to stand there 'til they're sure? He swallows.

Just when he's about to ask Helios whether or not they ought to go, a flash illumines the sky. A pillar of white light beams up to the heavens. Aeon gasps, and then just like that, it's gone. He blinks at the blank sky, stares around--did anyone else see that? is anyone else even here?--and finally turns to Helios. "What--"

Helios' expression is inscrutable. He only stares up at the sky, at where Marsh just was, at where she just went. "Interesting," he says.

 

\---tbc---


	2. shooting stars are hard to find

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I remembered my dream," says Helios.

Brenda Tregennis lies sprawled on her back on the tile floor of the kitchen, limbs flung out, one knee still bent as if in the act of kicking. Her back is frozen in an arch with her head thrown back; her fingers are stiffened into claws, digging into the floor, nails broken and blood caked brown in the nailbeds. 

Helios paces around her in a slow circle. He pauses when he gets to her face, nostrils flaring as his eyelids flicker. Aeon follows him, curious at first, and sucks in a breath at what he sees: a face frozen in a horrified rictus, lips drawn back from her teeth, eyes bulging like a frightened toad's. He thinks she must have died filling her lungs for a scream.

"Interesting," Helios murmurs. He crouches down next to the body, leaning forward to sniff all around her face; Aeon can't repress a swallow of disgust, never mind that he's seen Helios do this dozens of times. Helios checks her gums, her eyelids, her crusted fingernails, and then stands up to take in the rest of the kitchen. 

The house has not been occupied in decades, and the kitchen has long been gutted of its appliances. Dust and cobwebs grey the corners, and Aeon fancies he can hear a scurrying in the walls, bats breathing in the attic. This place has a reputation for being a haunted house, and Tregennis a reputation for being a psychic, a ghost-talker, albeit the sort who has cameras following her around. Until, of course, she met the wrong ghost, or so they're here to prove or disprove. Either way, she'll no longer be on SKY1 on Thursday nights at 8.

The table underneath the window--one of the sole pieces of furniture left in the house, or perhaps it was brought in for the filming--is covered in candles of all shapes and sizes, some of them burned down into puddles of deep-coloured wax and others still whole. Some star-in-a-circle design has been chalked into the wood, and wooden bowls of mysterious substances ring the sign. Helios turns his attention to this now, bending low over the pooled wax and charred wicks. Aeon sketches a layout of the room into his notebook.

"Who opened the window?" Helios asks.

"What?" says Lestrade from outside, where he lingers, arms crossed, with his impatient team.

"The window," Helios snaps. "It was raining last night; it would have been closed. Who opened it?"

Lestrade exchanges glances with his team members, who raise their eyebrows and shrug. "Must have been one of the crew. One of the ones who found her."

"Well, find out who it was and bring them in here. I need to speak to them."

There are two culprits, if they can be called that: a towering, spotty-faced young man with ginger hair, and a slender young woman with her hair done up in dozens of braids. They both look wan and ill, but the young woman--just a girl, really--looks particularly bloodless. They introduce themselves as Adam and Georgina, respectively. Georgina was technically the first in the room, but she fainted upon seeing Tregennis' rigid body. She spent half an hour with the medical responders, breathing oxygen and being treated for shock.

"I dunno why that happened," she says, sheepish, her arms crossed in front of her stomach, her hands at her elbows. "I'm not--I mean, I'm not usually like that."

"And I came in after," says Adam. "The air was orful thick, like; Brenda was always burning herbs 'n' stuff, to call out the ghosts or whatever. Made me feel ill. So I opened the window, and then I called the others and I called 999."

"You didn't touch anything else?" says Helios.

Adam shakes his head, then Georgina.

And just like that, the spell is broken. The tension drains out of the room; Helios' shoulders relax and his face smoothes into nonchalance, assuming the introspective expression of a man whose brain=wheels are turning. He turns and stalks from the kitchen without another word, hands clasped behind his back, coattails trailing behind him. Adam and Georgina blink and look at Aeon.

Aeon shrugs. "Guess that means you're free to go." Then he runs after Helios, hopping over Brenda Tregennis' outstretched leg on the way.

They sweep by Lestrade, who watches them go with mouth agape before uncrossing his arms to jog after them. "Hey! That's it? Haven't you got anything to tell us? The culprit is a man with size eleven feet with a ruddy face and a pronounced limp, something like that?"

Helios gives groan of deepest disgust and stops in front of the front door, somehow managing to whirl his coat dramatically as he does so, and Aeon grinds to a halt lest he run into him. "You know my methods, Inspector." Helios bites off the words as if they're the ends of cigars. "Now kindly let me employ them. I'll contact you when I have something concrete."

Lestrade pulls his dignity back on and draws himself up, his lips pressed thin and tight. "We've got the footage from the kitchen camera, back at the station. Shall I let you know if we see anything unique?" he says, not without a trace of bitterness.

"Please do." Helios turns and whisks out the door.

Aeon gives Lestrade an apologetic, sympathetic smile, and then follows Helios out into the drizzly winter morning.

\-----

It's been three months since Marsh left them, and darkness has spread across and down Aeon's wings until only the tips of his primaries are still frosted white. Helios pins evidence to the walls, conducts malodourous experiments in the kitchen sink, flops about on the floor and drapes himself over the furniture, eats at two in the afternoon or four in the morning but never at dinnertime, and utters brilliant and acerbic remarks regarding TV shows, Aeon's choice of reading material, and the intelligence of the population at large. Aeon takes over the duties of cooking, hoovering, and taking out the rubbish, since Helios is either dangerous or useless at these activities. 221A remains unoccupied, though Aeon checks it and 221C for evidence of emerging cocoons every few days.

Helios precedes Aeon up the seventeen steps to their flat, whereupon he yanks open all the sitting room windows and the one in the kitchen. Cold air blasts in, and Aeon, who was just hanging up his coat, shivers and puts it back on. "What're you doing?"

"It's for an experiment!" Helios barrels up the second flight of stairs to Aeon's room, presumably to fling open the window there, too. Then he bounds back down in a flurry of swirling coat and black feathers, breathing hard, and draws a small plastic bag from his pocket. "Found this on the table. The 'herbs 'n' stuff.'" He imitates young Adam's drawl with startling accuracy and holds up the bag for Aeon's inspection.

Aeon peers at the bag. About a teaspoon of ashy stuff sits in the bottom. Some of it is vaguely green in nature, not dissimilar to the dried parsley and basil in the pantry, but there are other things in there too: brown flecks, grey dust, white grains. "What is it?"

"That's what I plan to find out." Helios' eyes gleam; he's grinning. He likes nothing better than a challenge. "Whatever it is, it killed Brenda Tregennis. It was mixed in with her herbs, she burned it as part of the ritual, and it set off a powerful hallucinogenic poison that killed her, as you saw, and caused one of the crew to faint."

"Whoa." Aeon holds up one hand, to no avail; Helios has already fluttered into the kitchen and started opening cupboards. "Whoa, whoa, wait. Shouldn't we turn this over to the police, then? It's a murder weapon. It might--it could be dangerous."

Helios reappears with a large red candle in a glass jar, thick around as his forearm, and places it on the end table by one of the armchairs. "She was killed by fresh administration of the stuff, whatever it is, and this is already burned; I collected it off the table itself. I've ensured that there's plenty of fresh air in the flat." He plucks a lighter from a shoe on the bookshelf. "And besides, you like danger."

Aeon opens his mouth and closes it again. Danger cured the limp in his leg; danger has him grinning in tight corners, fists raised, even as Helios insults the men who're closing in. He goes downstairs to open the front door, get more air circulating in the flat.

When he returns, Helios has dragged one of the chairs to the centre of the sitting room and arranges the little end table in front of it. Then he pushes over the second chair, too, its feet scraping along the floor. He straightens and regards Aeon with his hands on his hips. "Well?"

"Ready whenever you are." Aeon lowers himself into the chair, sets his jaw, and curls his fingertips over the ends of the armrests. He plants his feet flat on the floor and gives his chin a decisive jerk. "Go on."

Helios takes the other seat. He lights the candle, pops open the baggie, and tips it over. A pinch of the dust pours out into the flame and ignites in a puff of blackish, acrid smoke. It smells like burning and very little like tobacco, more like grassy and spicy and oh, and _foul_. Aeon wrinkles his nose, and

_everything is orange and purple and black and gold and swirls up before him in a circus of fireworks and_

_faces laughing mouths open and eyes agape teeth like jagged forests of sand and pain and he is in the desert blood raining down sweat and dying with sockets filling with red roses_

_salt in his mouth blood in his teeth and under his fingernails scored into the wood sand in his ears and between his toes he falls to his knees and the sky doesn't care and he has been blown apart a piece of him here and a piece of him in_

_London_

_town_

_"ah, and you couldn't bear to be anywhere else"_

MIND THE GAP

MIND THE GAP

MIND THE GAP

_two golden snakes wrapped round a wand and they hiss him away and up a glass black fall and trains clatter by going going going away from him_

_smells of coffee and of booze and so many teeth all crinkling together like plastic newsprint and all is brown_

_beige_

_grey_

_until sunlight hurts_

_his palms taste like metal his breath smells like coins and he is alone one single fleshy line with a jagged edge the animal that walks on three legs in the evening but it is not evening yet or it has been evening always plum sky over the city and he reaches for the heavy in his drawer and then it is_

always

4:33

Behind the blank and accusing digits Aeon can just glimpse Helios, who stares mesmerised into the candle flame, his fingers digging into the arms of his chair so deeply that the wood creaks. His lips are drawn back from his teeth, his eyes bulging out of their sockets. The fabric of the chair whimpers as it tears. The numbers are yanked away and Aeon looks instead at Brenda Tregennis lying on the floor of that kitchen, looking as if she'd died in terror and agony, and he thinks of Helios being found that way and cannot bear it.

He launches out of his seat, knocking over the candle and the end table on the way, and hauls Helios out of his chair by the armpits. He drags and carries and pushes Helios down the stairs, towards the promise of fresh air gifted them by the open door, and they collapse on the front steps with their limbs tangled together. Helios rolls off of him and down the steps to sag against the wall like a sack of flour, and Aeon pushes himself up to his hands and knees, sucking in great gasps of the wet London air and thinking he's never been so glad to have it soaking his lungs.

Helios turns himself into a sitting position on the pavement, still coughing, but weakly. He looks up at Aeon, eyes watery and pink. He holds one hand half-curled into a fist in front of his mouth.

"That thing you did," he wheezes. "That thing you just did. That was...good. That was...very good."

Aeon can only nod in response; he's still trying to catch his breath.

\-----

They sit on the front step side by side without looking one another, fingers in their armpits and elbows on their knees. The mist dews on their hair and shoulders and feathers. Shivers run over Aeon's skin, intermittently, though his coat covers him from neck to knee.

"We really ought to go in and take a look," Aeon says. "Place might be on fire."

"Unlikely," Helios murmurs. "The table wasn't on a rug or anything. And we would have smelled smoke by now."

"Still," says Aeon.

But neither of them moves.

"If the candle _did_ go out," says Aeon, "well, all the windows were open. So the place should be quite aired-out by now."

Helios does not reply. There is nobody home in his gaze. Aeon gets up with a snapping of his knees and bends his back into an arc, twisting his arms behind his head. He's just about to step back into the building when he feels Helios grip him by the wrist.

"I'm coming with you," says Helios, and Aeon nearly topples at the sudden weight on his arm, as Helios pulls himself up.

The candle is still alight, where it's sideways on the floor, but the size of the candle and its glass container prevented it from setting anything on fire. Aeon picks up the candle and blows it out; he'll wait for the wax to cool before scraping it up. "Thank goodness Marsh isn't here to see this. She'd have a fit." He looks up and around before finally glancing over his shoulder. He's not used to having Helios behind him.

Helios is standing in the entryway, his eyebrows high and crooked, his lips a little bit parted. Aeon sets the candle on the coffee table and says, delicately, as if imparting a suggestion to a temperamental relative, "Give me a hand with the furniture, will you?"

They restore the armchairs and the little table to their usual places, and then Aeon scrapes up the wax and throws it away. Helios puts the candle back in its cupboard. Neither of them closes the windows, and so they do all this wearing their damp coats. Aeon finds eggs and a bit of ham in the fridge and decides that they'll have omelettes for dinner. The question, when posed to Helios, receives no answer, but that's no surprise.

It's eerie; the flat is never so quiet with Helios around. Helios is accompanied by furious typing on a laptop; the tinkle and clank of glassware of his chemical experiments; muttered theories and imprecations when he's working on a case; the harsh barks and melodious sighs of his violin. Now, Helios wanders around the sitting room for a bit in his bare feet before disappearing into his bedroom and shutting the door behind him. Aeon eats alone and places the remaining omelette in the refrigerator, wrapped up in cling-film on a plate. He retires to the sitting room and tries to read a magazine, but he can't concentrate. Every time he blinks, he sees the staring numbers outlined red, and terror seizes his lungs and punches a hole in his stomach all over again.

\-----

The culprit is Mark Tregennis, Brenda's flatmate and brother. Reality shows must run in the family, beacuse he's got one too: "How to Survive," where he demonstrates for the viewers how he grows a beard and forages for grubs and finds running water in all manner of places, from the Mongolian steppes to the Amazonian rainforest. He found the "devil's foot root" whilst going mad in a jungle in the Democratic Republic of Congo and managed to smuggle a bit of it back to the UK, God only knows how. He's got a bit of a gambling problem, a bit of a flashy car problem, a bit of a fine tailoring and ostentatious jewelry problem. He had an argument with his sister, with whom he shares a flat, about insurance, inheritances, something like that. He has an alibi for last night--that gambling problem--but it's not as if he didn't know where his sister kept her herbs. It was the work of a moment to sprinkle some of his nefarious ground-up root in with it, and his sister died in terrified agony. That was why the small, slender Georgina fainted upon entering that tainted room, but not the larger Adam, who was able to open the window and spare Mark Tregennis from taking two more victims.

"Really a very straightforward case," Helios murmurs, once they're back safe and sound in their still rather draughty flat. One of the windows in the sitting room is still open, as well as the window in the kitchen, and Aeon kept the window in his bedroom open all night, so that he had to curl into a ball under the covers in order to stay warm. "It was only the murder weapon that was unique."

Helios does not seem to have been affected by their ordeal at all, apart from that strange, silent evening. This morning he burst into Aeon's room, hair twisting from his head in wild curls, an exclamation leaping from his throat: "We have our man!" They confronted Mark Tregennis at his flat, and he confessed to everything once the truth was laid before him. His face crumpled like wet newspaper. Lestrade was not happy with their unorthodox methods, but then, he never is. 

Now Helios sits in his chair, wrapped in his long wool coat against the chill, vibrating with the satisfaction of a case well solved. His gaze is directed upwards, not at the ceiling, but somewhere beyond, where every case is sends the hounds baying for blood. Aeon thinks of the rust in Brenda' nailbeds, the broken blood vessels in her pinkened eyes, her taut, rigid muscles. He can't even remember the substance of his own visions anymore, save for the menacing numbers on the clock. But he'll never forget that feeling of total terror, the despair, and the absolute absence of any mercy or end to it. He thinks of Brenda dying that way, and he shudders.

"I'm for bed," he announces, and pushes himself out of his chair.

Helios actually turns his head to look at Aeon. "But it's the afternoon."

At any other time, Aeon supposes he might be proud to have surprised him. But right now he is angry and tired both, although he doesn't know why he's angry, or who he's angry at. Helios, for being a callous son of a bitch? Or himself, for expecting any different? He's had months to get to know Helios, and he knows that Helios is saddened by predictability.

"Bed," Aeon repeats, and drifts up to his room, letting his footfalls land a little more heavily than usual.

He has no idea what to do once he's there, of course. He's read and reread his handful of gifted books, and the thought of typing up the notes for this case makes his stomach threaten to revolt. His laptop is here, but what is he going to do with it? Reading the news will hardly lighten his mood, and there's nothing in his mailbox but spam. He has exactly three numbers in his mobile: Helios, Lestrade, and Marsh.

But he _is_ tired. He didn't sleep well last night. Aeon pulls off his jumper and kicks off his jeans and crawls under the covers. He closes his eyes and counts backwards from one hundred, until he no longer sees the red numbers there.

\-----

_He blinks and realises that he's been staring at a blank form for fifteen minutes now. Where did the time go? To Afghanistan, no doubt; to wondering how Kingsley's doing, and Howard, and Khan. Wondering whatever became of Washburne and Shipton. And reliving, always reliving, the fire in his limbs, and that single, gasped plea: God, let me live._

_What a joke. This isn't living. He closes his laptop without looking at the screen and crosses the room to sit on the bed. The view isn't any different or better from there, and he has to stare straight ahead to keep from looking too hard at the desk drawer. Finally, he decides to go for a walk. Anything's better than sitting in this depressing hole, waiting for it to become any less brown or any more fulfilling._

_But walking, of course--and he remembers this only after he's already in the park--only reminds him that he can't walk anymore. Oh, sure, he can stump along with this ugly alumnium thing, the rubber handle warm against his sticky palm, and everyone around can pretend not to pity him. But every step he takes only reminds him that he used to be whole and useful and unpathetic._

_Oh God, that's Mike, isn't it? Mike Stamford, from medical school. Don't look, don't look; maybe he doesn't remember you._

_"John?" Mike calls. "John Watson!"_

_He puts the gun to his head. He feels it cold against his temple. He closes his eyes and exhales at the same time as he pulls the trigger._

Aeon's eyes snap open. His heart bangs against his sternum, crying to be let out. Saliva fills his mouth. Aeon lurches from the bed, stumbles down the stairs, and makes it to the bathroom just in time to retch into the sink. Good thing he skipped dinner last night, he thinks, just before he heaves again. His stomach muscles ache with the effort.

He staggers weak-kneed from the bathroom into the kitchen, which is _freezing_. The windows are still open, and every part of the flat feels like a refrigerator. He shuts the kitchen window and goes to close the one in the sitting room--this is silly, this is paranoia, is what it is, they're hardly going to suffocate _now_ \--when a voice in the darkness says, "No, leave it."

Aeon jumps, and his heart kicks into a sprinter's pace again. He can see Helios now, just a lump on the couch, one side of him outlined by the streetlamp shining through the unshuttered window. He's wearing a sheet wrapped around his torso, part of it pulled over his head into a hood, so that only his face looms pale out of the darkness.

"Christ." Aeon sinks down into his chair, one hand on his chest. "You scared me. What're you doing sitting in the dark?"

He knows as soon as it's out of his mouth that it's a stupid question. Sure enough, Helios tilts his head and asks, smooth as a surgeon's scalpel slicing through skin, "What were you doing retching in the bathroom?"

Aeon runs a hand through his hair and makes an expression of wry acknowledgment, not that Helios can see it. He could turn on the light, he supposes, but he doesn't think he's ready to face that just yet. "Nightmare. You?"

Helios doesn't reply. Aeon leans forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and presses his fingertips together so that the empty space between them forms a pyramid. He looks through it to the floor below and thinks about the leaden, dreadful feeling in his stomach that he can't swallow down but that he was unable to bring up in the bathroom. He can't remember the content of his dream now, only the impact that shook him awake. He doesn't know if it was the same vision he saw in the candle flame. He doesn't know what Helios dreams about, or what he saw.

"I'm sorry," says Helios.

Aeon's head snaps up. He's not sure he's ever heard Helios apologise for anything before, at least not unaccompanied by biting sarcasm: _My apologies that you're too blind to see what's in front of your nose_ , or _I regret that you weren't gifted with the sense God gave an anteater_. "For what?"

"I endangered your life," Helios says. "Recklessly."

"Oh." Aeon sits up a little straighter. It sounds dangerously as if Helios is apologising for being stupid, and this alarms him for some reason. "Well, you did warn me. I knew what I was getting into. And you're right: I like danger."

"I assured you--I thought--that we were not in any real danger." The sheets rustle, and Helios' face fades into fuzzy shadow. "I was wrong."

First an apology, and now an admission of error. Aeon gets up and crosses the room, noiseless in his bare feet, and sits down next to Helios. Helios doesn't move or acknowledge him in any way. "It's all right," says Aeon. "I mean, we're all right. We're alive, and we caught the killer."

Silence swells to fill the space between them, bordered by their staggered breaths. The air from the window is cold, and Aeon shivers. He's still dressed in his t-shirt and shorts from bed, and his knees prickle.

Helios shifts, and the sheets slide against each other with a crackle like a newspaper page being turned. "We are. But we might not be next time." Helios takes a deep breath and lets it out through his nose. Aeon waits, tongue dry in his mouth. 

"I remembered my dream," says Helios. "It wasn't the sun. It was a lamp in the ceiling. I was lying on the floor, and a man was laughing at me. I'd taken a foolish bet, and I lost. I took the wrong pill." Helios pauses again, and Aeon strains to make out his expression. Is it penitent, pensive, thoughtful, regretful? He can't see; he can't tell. "I've been...foolish. I think...I thought, perhaps, that I would always be right, and that if I were wrong the consequences would not be dire. But they were. They are.

Aeon finds moisture enough to wet his lips. "Oh."

Helios stands and the sheets stand with him: a white, crinkled mass with two skinny, barefooted legs sticking out the bottom. "It's one thing for me to gamble with my own life. But it's another to gamble with yours, when you've--" He looks at Aeon. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight," says Aeon. Helios pads through the kitchen and disappears into his room, and Aeon wonders just how he was going to finish that sentence.

\-----

The next morning, Helios' wings glare like fresh-fallen snow in sunlight.

\-----

Helios spends the day peering out of windows and tapping his fingers against any available surface: _tip-tap-tap-tap_ against bookshelves, chair arms, his own thigh or knee. He paces; he scratches out half a melody on the violin and then abandons it to gaze out the window again, bow dangling from his fingertips. He throws out half of his chemical experiments, glassware shattering at the bottom of the bin, and eats half the omelette that Aeon left for him in the fridge. At one point he puts on his coat, opens the front door, and makes it as far as the pavement before he comes right back again and asks Aeon what's for lunch.

Finally, a little before he would ordinarily be thinking about what to make for dinner, Aeon says, "You're leaving, aren't you?"

Helios stands by the bookshelf, one hand tucked into the pocket of his trousers and the other tugging the volumes out halfway to inspect their covers before pushing them back in. He doesn't look up. "I believe so."

Aeon places his hands on the back of the chair and tells himself they aren't trembling. His wings rustle. "That's. That's wonderful." His smile must be terrifically insincere. "So you'll finally get to see what's on the other side of the wall."

"If it's not some kind of fantastic metaphor, yes." Helios tucks another book back in its place and simply stands there with both hands in his pockets, a lean and elegant figure black and white all over, like an illustration in a book. Aeon thinks it's the stillest he's been all day.

He swallows. "When are you leaving?"

When Helios moves, the sun strikes his face just so to bring out the unreal blue in his eyes. "Soon, I think."

"The park? Like Marsh?"

"Most likely."

"I'll go with you."

Helios does not object; he doesn't even move. So Aeon goes and fetches his coat.

They walk in silence to the park, and through it. It's damp but not raining, the grass still silvered with wet, and there aren't many strollers out. The clouds have parted for the sun, but there's a stiff breeze that plucks at their collars and ruffles through their feathers and their hair. Helios' strides are long and purposeful, and Aeon, as always, is a few steps behind, his thoughts flying in ever-tightening selfish, hungry spirals. 

They come to the boating lake far too soon, and Aeon wishes he'd spent the walk engaged in conversation. It's too late now. They stand before the bridge where Marsh vanished those months ago, and the water washes gently against the piers.

Aeon stiffens his back and turns on his heel to face Helios. He clears his throat. "Well--"

To his immense surprise, he finds himself smothered in two wool-clad arms, his nose buried in Helios' scarf, wings crushed against his back. Before he can collect his thoughts, or even return the hug, Helios pulls away, though his hands remain on Aeon's shoulders.

"I don't have friends," he says, without meeting Aeon's eyes. "I've just got one." He bites his lip and looks away. His hands drop to his sides. When he looks back at Aeon, it's with beetled brow, a renewed determination in his expression. "You'll find me."

Aeon opens his mouth. "I--"

"Wherever I am, wherever I go, you _will find me_. You will." Helios leans in close, so close that Aeon's field of vision is consumed by enormous blue-green-grey eyes, and it strikes him as ridiculous that he can have known Helios for this long and never known the true colour of his eyes. "You _must_."

Helios straightens. He gives his lapels a little tug and his wings a little flap. "The name," he says, "is Sherlock Holmes. And we'll meet again, on the other side of the wall."

"Okay," says Aeon.

Helios nods. He crosses the bridge, his footsteps ringing against the wooden planks, and he does not look back. 

It begins to rain. Aeon stands there anyway, until that column of light pierces the heavens. He stands there long after it's faded, and every time he blinks he sees it again, a red flare in his vision.

\---tbc---


	3. you won't find me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aeon shrugs. "Nothing happens to me."

_Knock knock knock_.

Aeon sighs, heaves himself out of his chair, and takes his sweet goddamn time getting down the stairs. First his left foot, along with the cane, and then his right foot comes down to join the left. Repeat, seventeen times, hanging onto the railing all the while. Whoever it is waits without knocking again, so it must be someone he knows. Lestrade, probably. What a clever deduction for him to make, Aeon thinks wearily, and he opens the door.

Sure enough, it's the good detective. "Hulloa," he says. "Was in the neighbourhood, just thought I'd stop in..."

"Bollocks," says Aeon, but he opens the door wider anyhow. "Come on in."

He allows Lestrade to precede him up the stairs, and then takes his sweet goddamn time getting up them, too. Once upstairs, he asks Lestrade if he'd like any tea. Lestrade says no--one eye on Aeon's leg, no doubt--but Aeon goes into the kitchen anyway, because he wants some tea for himself, if nothing else. "Want anything to eat?" he asks. "I think there's a packet of Wotsits in the cupboard."

"No thanks." Lestrade holds up a hand and gives Aeon a tight smile. "But seeing as you're up, I'll change my mind about that cuppa."

Aeon gets down another cup with a grim smile of satisfaction. He puts the water on to boil and stumps back into the sitting room to take the chair opposite Lestrade. "So then, Inspector, how's life?"

"Well, y'know, it's goin'. Me and the missus are back together." Lestrade sighs and scrapes one hand across his stubbled chin. "Cases take longer, but the paperwork takes shorter. It's a lot more...predictable." Aeon nods and lets his gaze focus on the bookshelf behind Lestrade. Lestrade shifts in his seat, uncomfortable. "What about you?"

Aeon shrugs. "Nothing happens to me."

"I've been reading your blog."

Lestrade's face swims back into focus. Aeon blinks. "Oh. So you, ah, found out about that."

"Hard to miss," Lestrade chuckles. "It's become very popular reading. You oughta put up one of those hit counters. See how it goes." He lays one arm along the armrest; the other sits like a restless insect on his thigh. "It's interesting stuff, actually. Some of it I knew, of course; I was there. But a lot of it I didn't. The little private cases, those he didn't tell me."

Aeon lets a smile twitch up one side of his mouth. It hurts a little, but not in his face. It sends a thread of pain down to his chest and spins a web that sticks. "I liked the private cases. They were more interesting, a lot of the time. Stuff the police wouldn't believe, you know, so they came to him."

"Yeah." Lestrade leans his elbows onto his knees and rubs his hands together, as if they're cold. "I liked the one about the, ah, the melting laptop. He never told me about that one, the berk."

"There was a reason for that." The kettle clicks, and Aeon uses his cane to pull himself out of his seat. He pours the tea, fishes out the teabags, and brings both cups back to the sitting room, moving slowly with the cane slung over his arm.

Lestrade lurches half out of his seat in his haste to take his cup. "Ta," he says, and sits down again, his tea sloshing almost over the rim. "So nothing else, then, besides the blogging?"

Aeon shrugs. "Like I said, nothing happens to me."

\-----

But of course nothing happens to a man who hardly even goes outside.

The first few days after Helios left, Aeon stayed in the flat, subsisting on milk and cereal and toast and beans. When finally he ran out of everything edible, he begged Mr Chatterjee for a sandwich and a coffee, which the man provided because who could turn down a pleading, heartbroken Wing? Not Mr Chatterjee, and so Aeon was able to make do, until he took a pair of Helios' cufflinks to Tesco and traded it for enough groceries to last for weeks.

Then he thumbed through every book, slit open Helios' mattress, searched inside and under every shoe, and even pried the velvet off the inside of the violin case. He checked inside the skull, tapped his way round the mantlepiece, tore up the edges of the wallpaper and the underside of every table and chair. Such a methodical man as Helios must have left notes: he took notes on every chemical reaction, kept a file on every sensational crime perpetrated in the last year, he had a _sock index_ for Chrissakes. But no notes on the nature of Wings, nothing about the wall. Did he keep it all in that big, brilliant, beautiful head of his, then? Nothing for Aeon to glean? Nothing that would help him _follow?_

The black wings are a manifestation of some 'sin' that kept them here, said Helios, and so Aeon read all that he could about sin. Helios' sin was _pride_ , that was clear: he was--had been--nothing if not arrogant, and it was that arrogance that led him to that reckless experiment with the devil's foot root. Arrogance that led him to take the wrong pill that brought him here.

Aeon thought, selfishly, that he was grad Helios was such a hubristic prick, if it meant they got to meet.

But what about himself? None of the other sins seemed to fit, although of course Aeon was not perhaps the best judge of his own character. Still, he did not seem wrathful or gluttonous or lustful or slothful, at least not moreso than any typical human being. And yet, one of these sins wrapped his feathers black and kept him from flying. But maybe they didn't mean one of the seven deadly sins? There was, according to his research on Wikipedia, any number of smaller, venial sins, and then of course the other religions all had their own concepts of sin as well, and--

Oh, how he wished Helios were here. Helios would be able to solve this mystery. But he wasn't, and Aeon was trapped here alone, his wings as black as pitch and nothing, no one, to fill his days.

\-----

"Well, if you're lookin' for work, you know," Lestrade says, "you're always welcome at New Scotland Yard. There's always filing and such to do."

"Thanks, but I'll get by." Aeon takes the empty teacups into the kitchen and sets them down in the sink with loud clanks.

Lestrade, standing in the sitting room, is worried and brown and looks like he wants something to donwith his hands. But he lets Aeon shepherd him to the door--even down the seventeen steps, long and arduous as a hike up Mount Everest--and then just stands there and says, "I mean it. Anytime."

Aeon pauses with his hand on the knob. "I know," he says at last, with a false, brave smile, and lets Lestrade out.

He can't tell Lestrade, of course, that he can't work anywhere that reminds him of Helios, and everywhere reminds him of Helios. The dry cleaner's where he used to get his suits laundered; the library where Helios borrowed books and leafed through periodicals; St Bart's where Helios studied bodies in the morgue and performed chemical experiments that Aeon refused to let in the flat; the Tesco where Aeon did most of the shopping, avoiding carrots because Helios hated them and texting Helios to ask if they needed milk (and they always needed milk); the church where a client's husband-to-be once disappeared, only to turn out to be her stepfather in disguise. Taxis remind him of Helios; Italian food reminds him of Helios; even dogs barking remind him of Helios.

It's stupid. He sounds besotted; he acts like a grieving widow.

Aeon glances at the clock. Lestrade's visit delayed him a little, but there's still plenty of time.

He packs a ham sandwich, a bottle of water, and an energy bar. He puts on a pair of trainers with hardly any wear on them that Marsh found in her wardrobe, left behind by a previous tenant; his most comfortable shoes. He brings his notebook, his pen, and his mobile because it has a camera on it (no one calls or texts him now and there is no one for him to contact). He puts on his jacket, pats his pockets until he hears his keys jingle, and finally leaves the flat.

He has to wait 10 minutes for a bus and boards through the rear doors. The driver glances back at him, sees the wings, and doesn't yell. Aeon takes a seat in the back and settles in for a long ride. He props his elbow up against the side of the bus and looks out the window, at the signs sliding by in English, Arabic, Chinese. Helios could read all those languages, to no one's surprise, but it turned out Aeon knew a little Arabic, too. Military, Helios supposed; it would explain the hand-to-hand combat, the gun knowledge. What an interesting life he must have led, on the other side. A far cry from his existence now.

Half an hour later, he disembarks and boards another bus, and then another bus. The wall grows ever closer, until it consumes the sky, until Aeon thinks he can start to make out bricks instead of just a featureless grey slab. He feels his palms prickle and the hairs on the back of his neck itch. His stomach aches around the milk and tea he put in it. Is it the proximity of the wall, or psychosomatic nervousness? And to think that Helios _touched_ it. He must have tried to feel for a weakness in the mortar, perhaps even tried to scale it somehow. Aeon isn't going to do any of that. He's just going to have a look, that's all. Maybe ask a few questions. But he won't touch the wall.

Nearly two hours after his journey began, he descends the bus in Hadley Wood, where the wall is so close that sunset comes hours early. The neighbourhood beyond--if there is a neighbourhood beyond--must live in perpetual shadow. Still, though, they seem like ordinary people, going about their ordinary lives: women with orange Sainsbury's carrier bags, children running home from school, men with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. Aeon shoulders his bag and sets off down the street, looking for a road that looks like it might lead towards the wall.

Aeon walks for what feels like ages, and several times he has to stop and knead his stupid, goddamn, recalcitrant leg, or rest at a bus bench. Several people ask him if he needs any help, and the last one he gives such a fierce glare that she starts and goes on with one hand pressed against her collarbone. He eats his energy bar and drinks some of his water and tells himself that he spent longer on his feet that first evening, when he was out looking for Helios, and to stop being such a twat, and he presses on.

And then, before him, he sees the lorries: they seem to come straight out of the wall, one after another, enormous and grey, with canvas pulled over their loads in the back. There are a lot of people gathered on the pavement here, as if watching a parade go by; indeed, some of the adults have small children up on their shoulders. The children squeal and wave their hands.

Aeon taps a woman on the shoulder. "Excuse me," he says, "what's going on?"

She turns around, and her gaze drops low and behind him. Her expression changes to something soft and fond, like a woman encountering a toddler or a guilt-stricken dog. "Oh, I suppose you wouldn't--it's the traders! They come every year, 'round this time, though of course we're never exactly sure when, I suppose only they know that. They bring all sorts of things from the other side, food and tools and toys and what have you."

"They come from the other side of the wall?" Aeon tries to peer over the heads and around the lorries, even going so far as to stand on his toes, but there are too many people and the tunnel seems not very wide. He can't catch even a glimpse of sky on the other side. "They're the only ones?"

The woman frowns at him, and Aeon wonders if perhaps this is a touchy subject, like asking someone how much money they make, or if they've seen anyone about that rash. But she looks at his wings again, as if reminding herself that he's only a child in their ways, and takes a deep breath. "No, no one's allowed in or out. Only the traders."

"All right." The last lorry rumbles by, and with it comes a great creaking and a clanking, of enormous doors being winched shut. The crowd around them starts to loosen, little ice floes of humanity breaking off and floating away. "I want to ask them a question."

The woman laughs, not without bitterness. "Good luck with that."

Aeon blinks. "Why?"

She tosses her brown hair over her shoulder. "They're not allowed to speak to us."

"What, at all?"

"At all." Her face softens a little, around her eyes and the corners of her mouth. "But you should come anyway. S'in Covent Garden. There'll be plenty to look at, and there's things you won't be able to find in London. And it's only once a year." 

Aeon nods. Disappointment scrapes against the inside of his ribs, but it can't take hold; his heart is beating, faster and faster, like he can see Helios ahead of him, sailing over the gap to land catlike on his feet on the next building over, glancing back, waiting for Aeon to follow.

\-----

First thing in the morning, before the sky has even properly turned from the pinkish-grey of dawn to the slate of an overcast London day, Aeon takes the bus to Covent Garden. The bus is _packed_ , mostly with grey-haired grannies and a few hunted-looking housewives, clutching their children's small, sweaty hands, and vomits out nearly its entire contents at Covent Garden, including Aeon. The square is busy with jacket-padded people, their scarves wound round their necks, but not yet packed from shoulder to shoulder. That'll come later, when the sun climbs farther into the sky and brings the people with it.

None of the enormous lorries from yesterday are present, though a few smaller vans have been driven straight onto the pavement, their doors flung open in the back to let buyers inspect their cargo. The rest of the traders have tarps spread on the ground and folding tables covered in plastic sheeting, and every one is crowded round with prospective customers. Aeon doesn't have any money, of course; he doesn't have anything except his clothes and his cane. He stumps his way to one of the vans, which has a smaller crowd about it. "Excuse me!" he calls. "Excuse me!" He manages to elbow forward, until he can speak more directly to one of the traders. "Excuse me, I was wondering, have you..."

The trader looks up, and then the disappointment grabs hold of Aeon's feet at last and drags him down. The trader has blue tape over his mouth in an X. So does his colleague.

Covent Garden is filled with the babble of three thousand voices, but they are all London voices: children crying for lolly, women muttering over the price of exotic fruit, men trying a few notes on a tiny trumpet or strumming a tune on a ukelele. "Sorry, never mind," Aeon mutters, swallows, and fades back. He stumbles to the edge of the market and takes shelter next to a pillar, where he can watch people stream by carrying bottles of wine and baskets of vegetables, tiny potted fruit trees, glazed pottery. And besides those more prosaic, utilitarian items, there are cloudy bottles of potions and philtres, jars of glittering, coloured sand, carved and twisted sticks that claim to be magic wands and dowsing rods.

It's only once a year, he thinks, even as his heart numbs itself to hope. Helios never came to this market, or surely he would have mentioned it. Helios would have liked it. Had they come here together, Helios would mutter dire imprecations about the truthfulness of that lock of hair claiming to be from a mermaid, and he would probably manage to deduce any number of things about the traders, even though they are all dressed in identical shapeless black hoodies, hoods pulled up over their heads, blue tape over their mouths.

Aeon pushes himself off the wall and takes a little walk, leaning heavily on his cane all the while. He pauses at one table to pick up a small glass bottle. Black liquid swirls within. "Is this really a bottle of magic ink?" he asks the elderly man next to him.

The man peers back at him from under bushy grey eyebrows. "That's what it says."

Aeon looks up at the trader with raised eyebrows. The trader holds up eight fingers. Aeon puts the bottle down again.

There's nothing for him here. While the traders cannot be called helpful or friendly--they can't even talk, after all--they at least seem interested in their customers. But not Aeon. Doubtless they know that Wings don't have money, and they can see that he brought nothing to barter. So he drifts away, thinking vaguely about what's at home that he can have for lunch. A sandwich, probably. He's running low on food again. He'll have to give up more of Helios' jewelry. That's fine; Helios was never terribly attached to the pretty trinkets his clients brought him. But eventually it'll come down to bartering away his clothes, or even his violin, and--no. Aeon swallows. He'll get a job before he has to do that.

On his way out of the grounds, down one of the little alleyways, Aeon spies a dingy little white van, its back doors open. There are only two sellers, one of them sitting inside the van itself, the other outside with one foot propped up on a wheel, and only a little queue of people with their hands in their pockets, each doing their best to pretend no one else is there. Aeon slows to a stop just in time to overhear a woman with long grey hair wring her hands together and say, "...passed away last week. I miss her so much..."

The traders glance at each other. Some message passes in the frisson between their gazes, and the one sitting in the van pushes himself to his feet and disappears inside. The inside of the van seems curiously dark and opaque. The trader is gone for a long while, and when he returns, he dangles from one finger a brilliant golden cage, shaped like a dome, and perched inside on a little swing is a yellow-and-green bird with bright black eyes and an orange beak. Upon seeing the light, it gives a happy little trill that fills the very air with joy.

The woman gasps and bursts into tears, all in the same breath, even as some weight falls from her shoulders and grows her taller. "Oh, thank you, thank you," she sobs, reaching forward with both her hand to clutch the cage. It trembles in her hands, but the bird sings anyway. "Oh, she _did_ love to sing, and I'm all alone in the house now, and oh--thank you." She thrusts her hand into her pocket and then presses it into the trader's outstretched hand and, still sniffling and rubbing her eyes, she carries the cage away.

Aeon joins the queue, and watches a tall, shaggy-haired young man in a raggedy blue suit receive a music box, a little ginger-haired girl receive a stuffed tiger, a stooped and elderly man receive a notebook, a young woman receive a pair of shoes and a ribbon. Theym in turn, exchange a bent cigarette, a tattered picture book, a single rose, a framed photograph. They all leave in tears, save for the little girl, who leaves with a delighted smile, clutching her stuffed tiger so hard it bulges at the seams. Aeon swallows and steps up to the van next, conscious that there are people behind him, politely pretending that they can't hear.

"Hello," he says. The trader only stares, unsmiling. Aeon shifts his weight onto the cane. "I haven't any money. Or anything. You probably know that Wings, ah, we're not allowed. To have money. And I haven't anything I can trade, even. But I, I was wondering if you'd help me anyway."

The trader gives one slow, patient blink. But he doesn't make any effort to shoo Aeon away, so Aeon takes another deep breath and continues. "I've a friend. Had. This friend. He went away. Over the wall, they say. That's where you're from, isn't it? From the other side of the wall. So I was just wondering if you'd...seen him, maybe. He's tall, about this tall," he raises his hand high above his head, "very pale, with black, curly hair, and blue eyes. Light blue. Or grey, or green, they're so light it's hard to tell. Dresses like a posh git and talks like one, too. If you've seen him, maybe you've a message for me, or something. I," he swallows again, suddenly awake to the dim horror that he might start crying, right here, in front of all these strangers, and he digs his nails into his palm. "I miss him, and if you haven't seen him, maybe you can g-give me something that'll, that'll help me find him."

The traders exchange that weighty glance again, the one they always exchange, and a bright yellow bubble blooms in Aeon's heart. The trader disappears into the van, and Aeon manages to stand up a little straighter even as he tries to clear his suddenly congested nose.

The trader seems to be gone for a very long time. Aeon tries not to fidget. The other trader is still leaning against the van, relaxed, so he doesn't worry. Much. Finally, the first trader emerges. He takes Aeon's hand and presses something into it. Aeon, not expecting the sudden weight, nearly drops it.

It's a gun.

\-----

Aeon spends the entire journey home certain that he'll be caught out at any moment. He's stiff and tense, knuckles white from being clenched in his lap. He's sweating from his hairline and his upper lip. The bulge in the back of his shirt must be clear as foul play. It was cold against his skin at first, but now it's warm.

He has never held a gun before. There are no guns in London, and no need for them, as isolated as they are by the wall. But Aeon has no doubt that he knows how to use it. He knew, as soon as he felt the strange and familiar weight in his hand, how to stand, how to aim, how to fire, how to allow for the recoil. It makes his blood leap and bubble, and the skin prickles on the back of his neck and down his spine. Helios would think it delicious.

Aeon left his cane with the traders, but he doesn't seem to need it anymore; the gun stiffens his spine and numbs the pain in his leg, and he floats up the stairs to the flat. Once there, he sits down at the desk in the sitting room and ejects the (fully loaded, he notes, not without a chill that spreads itself across his skin and sets his ears to ringing) magazine and sets that aside. He dismantles the rest of the gun, as if he were about to clean and oil it, and that, like so many other things, is something he just knows how to do, until he thinks about it too hard and the knowledge fades away, until he's left staring at a neat array of components and wondering what he was doing. But he's done, and there's no message from Helios. No note, no engraved inscription, just a bunch of metal pieces and smoky oil on his hands. It's just a (semi-automatic handgun) gun.

He lets his face slide forward into his greasy hands. What is he supposed to do with this? If it's not a message from Helios, then what is it for? Surely he's not supposed to shoot someone with it? Who would he shoot? He knows not a soul in this world, apart from Lestrade and Mr Chatterjee and a handful of clients and Helios' contacts. He doesn't want to shoot any of them, and he fails to see how that would help.

Is he supposed to shoot--

Aeon stands bolt upright from the desk, sending his chair scuttling backwards and rattling the table. Something has crawled into his lungs. His breaths come fast, and his heartbeats rattle. He spins away from the desk and paces back and forth. His leg cramps up on him, and he stops and kneads it with his knuckles, but it's mild. He can still walk without stumbling, and he does, from wall to wall, until finally he fumbles his phone out of his pocket.

"H-Hello? Lestrade?" Aeon swallows. "I, ah, I think I'd like a job after all."

\-----

He doesn't take a berth at New Scotland Yard. Everything there is too painful and sharp and familiar, and Lestrade nods understandingly and says it so that Aeon doesn't have to. But Lestrade introduces him to Molly, a morgue technician at St Bart's, who Aeon actually knew slightly: she was an acquaintance of Helios'. (Everyone was an acquaintance of Helios'.) That very day, someone takes a pair of surgical scissors to a pair of scrubs, and Aeon has his own uniform. He feels better as soon as he has it on, and a smile stretches both sides of his face for the first time in what feels like years. 

Aeon works for a few hours each day, filing patient charts and boxing archived paperwork and mopping floors and fetching bad hospital coffee. His leg hurts intermittently, limiting his performance on those days, and though half the staff prods and pokes his thigh and they run scans and tests and draw blood, nothing is ever found to be wrong with him (which he already knew, but scientists). He visits Molly now and then, down in the blue-white fluorescence of the morgue, where she never attempts to start a conversation; she lets him just sit and bask in the quiet.

One day, she's recording a series of observations into her handheld digital recorder when Aeon interrupts with, "Scrofula."

Molly pauses. She turns off the recorder. "What?"

"I don't know. I just thought of the word." Aeon frowns down at the body, a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and two pronounced, blistering bulges in the sides of his neck. "But that's right, isn't it? You said he had AIDS. So he was immunocompromised, and he contracted tuberculosis. Of the neck. Scrofula." He blinks, opens his mouth, and then shuts it again. He isn't sure where that came from.

"That _is_ right." Molly puts the recorder down. "Aeon, name the bones of the wrist, in order."

The rest of Aeon freezes, but his mouth opens and rattles out, "Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate."

"And what's the mnemonic?"

"Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can't Handle." Now Aeon straightens. His hands clasp primly in his lap.

Molly subsides into silence, peering at Aeon with a thoughtful gaze. It makes him nervous. Molly is the sort of grey person who usually fades into the background, who's described with adjectives such as "mousy" and "shy." But now her eyes are bright, and she shimmers. "What should the vancomycin trough be when treating soft-tissue infections?"

"Ten to twenty micrograms per milliliter," Aeon replies.

Molly smiles. Her voice softens again. "You know, I think you've a bit of medical training."

"But Helios said I was in the military," Aeon protests, but it's a soft, weak-spined retort. 

"No reason you can't have been both," she says.

\-----

And from then on, Aeon is on nursing duties. He might well have the knowledge and skill to be a doctor, but he doesn't have a degree, not to mention his memory has a tendency to slip if he becomes too nervous or self-conscious. But he can dispense medication, change bandages, decipher patient charts, change IV bags, give injections--and he has a wonderful bedside manner, according to more than one patient. It cheers Aeon to be able to lift people's spirits, and when he hasn't anything else on, sometimes he makes a round of the rooms and visits with patients for a few minutes. He spends a lot of time in the hospital like this.

As long as he's on his feet, checking IV drips and drawing blood, then his mind is a warm, peaceful place and his leg doesn't bother him at all. It's when the day is over and he goes home to 221B Baker Street that the darkness creeps out of the corners at him. Then, Aeon powers on his laptop (or Helios' laptop, really--yet another thing he's left behind) and rereads his blog, reliving those wonderful adventures over and over again until they're faded and worn at the corners. He doles out a new one, every once in a while, on those nights when he's particularly hungry and the cold seems too close. But he doesn't have very many of them left, and he needs to make them last.

\-----

**16th June**

_Well, that was the last of my notes, so I suppose this will be the last entry on this blog. I don't have any more stories to tell, and Helios is gone, so there won't be any new cases. Thanks for reading, everyone._

Aeon hits the _Post_ button and sits back in his chair. It's so quiet in the flat that he can almost hear the dust settle, and the subsequent creak is a whipcrack in the stillness. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms and lets out a heavy, wellworn sigh. Then he gets up from his chair and goes to the window.

Summer has come to London at last, and with it warm, moist air that seems to rise from the river and blanket the whole of the city. Sunlight deigns to gold the pavement sometimes, and everyone goes about with a little more spring in their steps, a little more smile on their faces. Children run riot in the streets, unmoored from their backpacks and school uniforms. Even the patients at the hospital seem a little more restless. The ones with beds by the windows spend more time staring out the window; the ones with beds not by the window ask what the weather is like outside. Sometimes Aeon tells them, it's overcast, or oh, looks like a bit of summer rain is coming. But sometimes he tells them that the sky is blue, the swans are out on the lake, and we'll go feed them, when you're better.

Aeon makes a round of the flat. He puts away the dry dishes in the drainer, throws out the wilted lettuce in the crisper, and recycles some old magazines and newspapers lying about in the sitting room that he's resigned he'll never read. He takes out the rubbish. Then he walks back into the sitting room and stands there with his hands on his hips, surveying what remains. The flat is stuffed with the ghosts of other people, Wings that came and left their mark and went away. Aeon doesn't know what mark he'll leave. He doesn't have anything besides that gun in the drawer.

Helios' violin still rests on one corner of the couch that Aeon never sits on anymore. He goes over and opens it now, revealing the instrument inside resting in its crushed-velvet lining, the musty-smelling bow, a lump of reddish rosin. He picks up the violin, marveling at how light and simple it feels for something that produces such wonderful sounds. His fingers tighten on the neck. The violin gives a little whimper of protest, and then Aeon raises it over his head and smashes it against the wall.

It fractures from the first blow, and the second one bursts open the body, spilling out all the songs it will never sing, strings twanging and snapping into wicked-razor apostrophes. Aeon crosses the room, leaving a trail of woodchips in his wake, and flings the corpse into the fireplace. He stands there for a minute, breathing hard, fists curled by his sides, and then he snatches the skull from the mantlepiece and chucks that in, too. The criminology texts from the bookshelf are next, the medical encyclopaedias and poison dictionaries, the three jars of honey in the cupboard, and that stupid bloody candle. He pelts the beakers and flasks in there one by one, listening to the satisfying smash and crunch as they shatter against the brick. Aeon contemplates tearing down that poster of the periodic table (and who gave that to him, anyhow?) and the binders of news article clippings and scraps of notes, but that would involve going into Helios' room, so he doesn't. He just gets the matches instead.

He doesn't know the last time the chimney was swept. He doesn't care. This whole bloody flat can burn; what does it matter to him? What's the point in hanging onto mementoes? Just so that another Wing can come in here and play Helios' violin, drink tea out of Aeon's favourite mug, and eat off of Marsh's china? 

It takes him three tries to get the fire properly started. Then takes a torch with him and goes down to 221A and 221C.

221A is exactly as Marsh left it: basket of yarn in a corner of the sitting room, with a half-knitted gold and russet scarf hanging out over the wicker; blue and white china on display on the mantel; clothes neatly hung in the wardrobe. Aeon has no idea what a burgeoning coccoon looks like, but he assumes it would be obvious, after a certain point. After all, he came out of one fully grown, didn't he? Nonetheless, he shines the torch under the bed and the chairs, into corners, and even behind the refrigerator.

221C smells badly of damp and mildew, but it's bare of furniture. Aeon makes only one cursory circuit of the dank little basement flat before going back up again. He doesn't know what he would have done, if he'd found a coccoon. Stomped on it, maybe. Crushed it into oblivion. Prevent anyone else from being born into this miserable trap.

And after that, he's done. Aeon goes up to his room, sits on the bed, and takes the gun out of the drawer. He just holds it in his hands, feeling its weight, the texture of the grip, studying the grooves along the barrel. What happens to a Wing that's Sin-Bound indefinitely? Do they age? Do they grow old and die? Are there buried Wings in the graveyard, angels weeping over their plots, their weird Wing names engraved on their headstones? Or do they just fade away, the same way that faded into this world? Do their wings fall off, and then they join the ranks of hurried humans? (God, how Helios would have hated that!)

Aeon squeezes his eyes shut. God, he's such a fucking _failure_. Why the fuck can't he figure this out? Marsh figured it out. Helios figured it out. And yet here he is, stuck, his wings as black as tar and just as useful, and he grinds out his days at the hospital and then comes back in the evenings to write about Helios, hoping to find some clue, some gem, and now there's not even that. Nothing has any meaning, and he doesn't know if he can stand coming back to this flat night after night for _nothing_. He'd live at the hospital, but they won't let him do that. He'd move out of this place, but where would he live? He's got no money, and no way to earn money. This flat is set aside for Wings. If he moved out he'd have to live on the charity of others, like Lestrade or Molly or something, and he is so. Sick. Of. That.

He can hear his own breathing harsh in his ears, and his heartbeat throbs in his temples. Eyes still closed, he presses the gun to his temple. It's cold.

And when he closes his eyes, he sees those numbers again, those fucking meaningless numbers--

He opens his eyes. He looks at the clock. The time is 11:23.

_"I can't afford London on an army pension."_

_"Ah, and you couldn't bear to be anywhere else. That's not the John Watson I know." Mike Stamford's face rounds into a knowing smile._

_"Yeah, well, I'm not the John Watson--" He bites his tongue; a tremor has started in his left hand, sloshing about the coffee in his cup. He switches hands and forces his left hand into a fist, but it doesn't stop. Stupid fucking hand, just one more fucking thing that's wrong with him, that he can't control, that's ruined his goddamn fucking life._

_"Couldn't Harry help?" Mike asks._

_"Yeah, like that's gonna happen," John snorts._

_Mike shrugs. "I dunno--get a flatshare or something."_

_John gives Mike a look. "C'mon, who'd want me for a flatmate?"_

_Mike tilts his head. "Well...you try looking on Gumtree?"_

_John admits that he hasn't. He says he'll give it a whirl, but he knows deep in the cracks of his heart that he won't. He's beyond trying and beyond helping. He doesn't want to have to give a fuck anymore, because what's the point? There is no point. There is no point to anything without his leg, his hand, his medicine, his military career, all the things that made him useful and valuable and John Watson--_

_\--is just so angry--_

_\--at everyone--_

_\--at himself--_

_\--at God, for saving his life after all--_

Aeon sucks in a long, shuddering breath. His fingers jerk open of their own volition and the gun clatters to the floor, thank goodness with the safety still on. He brings his shaking hands up to cradle his face and he sits there for a long, long time with his face in his hands, his breath rasping on its way in and shaking on the way out, letting the anger drain out of him until his muscles are loose and soggy. What did he do? What did he almost do?

He smells smoke.

"Oh shit, the fireplace!" Aeon bolts down the stairs, cursing all the way. Had he even opened the flue?

\-----

The next day, the floors are swept and hoovered, the fireplace cleared, the rooms aired out, the beds all done up with hospital corners. Outside, the sun is shining, and the sky is a clear endless blue that not even the wall can touch.

Aeon goes for a walk to Regent's Park.

\---end---

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [on his torn and broken wings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/660190) by [dee-light (DraloreShimare)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DraloreShimare/pseuds/dee-light)
  * [on his torn and broken wings (DVD-style Commentary)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/694728) by [coloredink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/pseuds/coloredink)




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